EDIT NOTE: because all my stuff is just black line drawings, none of it shows up on the page Derek set up. Additionally, it only linked the small set of stuff I posted; the bulk of what I worked on is in the zip. It's small and easy to download, so.. check it out, or not. ;P

I really like prehistoric art! So I'm doing that. At the end of the month I'll zip these up into packs and they'll be available for download for the duration of the second part of the contest.

There'll be a (very) few animations on some of these, but most are going to be static. They'd probably work best for an overworld exploration game, or possibly a cave wall shmup. I've made some notes at the end of this post with game design sketches if you are for some reason absolutely enamored of this stuff and aren't sure how to use it. Won't be doing any coding in the second half myself, so that should be okay.

Until Derek decides on some official licensing guidelines, this is all under .

The ones above are this "constellation" style I've started playing with. I use a paint tube to dab an outline of the thing, sometimes basically on "vector"-type points, and sometimes more abstractly, then I spread the paint around between the "stars" with a knife tool to make the shape. I like how it looks, but it works a lot better at a larger scale. I tried it with a human figure and it was just too thick to really work.

For humans I'll probably just have to use a brush tool, maybe keep the paint spreading for large background objects.

And I'm trying to figure out how to do some smooth animations...

Mostly I hope they're useful for someone. It's fun for me, so that's good, but it looks like the majority of stuff so far is pixel art..

Doing animations was getting me down, because the shapes of things I use are kind of abstract, and then I started to think about level design, and got more down, because how the hell do you make a tilemap for prehistoric pictrographs and petroglyphs? I have some ideas, but I was getting bogged in conception and wasn't doing any work.

And so I got to thinking about an older game concept I had a few years ago: game play as act of creation.

The idea this was built around was a coffeebreak roguelike (and it got into some philosophical territory as well, but I'll leave that out of this post). Your character would go into a dungeon, performing various activities for this village that lived in your computer. Upon completion (success or failure) of the task, the villagers would immortalise your trek in the form of a piece of artwork. Did you fight a lot of orcs? You'd get a picture of some orcs on the canvas. Maybe they'd be missing heads (if you killed 'em with an axe) or full of arrows, et cetera. If you found certain dungeon features (waterfall, bottomless chasm, and so on) those would be displayed somewhere as well. You'd need a lot of time spent coding the importance of various coordinates: a waterfall displayed at the top of the canvas would symbolise something different from the waterfall at the bottom.

The goal was to have something concrete, some record of your play. If my hobby is pottery, after a few years, I'll have quite a collection of pots to show you. What do you have to show for your time spent playing games? I thought it'd be great not only to have something beyond a saved game or a video recording of that game, but to have a game whose sub-purpose was creation, not just killing time.

So anyway, if you're looking at any of these and thinking, "what the hell would I use a bunch of line art for?" that's one idea. [edit:links removed]

I really like some of those ideas. I think you should definitely make some more figures and props. Even some basic movement like you had would look pretty appropriate given the similarly minimal representation. If you made some basic tiles for a platformer type presentation I could see someone using it to describe a place, maybe like a level select screen for a game that has more representational graphics for the actual levels. There can never be enough caveman platform games!

The background's just a rock from my backyard. I think tomorrow I'll go on a field trip and try and get some better photographs.

I've given up on doing any significant animations for the protagonist character; it just doesn't look very good. Instead I've started thinking about what else you could do with this kind of art style. A big overworld exploration game would work, I think: character moves around the world, either the art being a scrolling layer overtop a static rock image, or else using the whole size of the rock image. Character can interact with stuff on the overworld however the game's designed. Could also work in console RPG-style battles if you wanted.

The other option - which can be combined with the above - is a spear-shmup. Little guy rides a dinosaur through a scrolling level, possibly with entrances attached to an overworld.

Everything above is discrete images - I used three hill images to build that set there - but I'm wondering if that'll actually be allowed in the contest. The designer/programmer would have to build levels ahead of time. This is true for pretty much every game style, unless you want to get needlessly complicated. If I have to hand-build every possible map/stage, it seems like it defeats the purpose of making general piecemeal assets that anyone can use. =/

If you have ever watched Ice age, there was a very nice scene composed only of cave paintngs, I'm not sure, but perhaps you could try that kind of animation?

I haven't, but I'll check it out to see what you're talking about. Thanks for the recommendation!

Went up to the gorge the other day to get some better rock photos, but the camera batteries were dead. -.- Will have to try again in a couple of days. There are no caves in my area, really, so exposed rock is going to have to do.

Once the frakking noise dies down outside I hope to be able to get some more done tonight. -.- driving me crazy argharghargarg

Thanks! I see how you mean; and actually that's about what I was going to try and animate as, just discrete "steps" between things. May still do some of that, not sure.

I'm also debating whether to try experimenting with color at all. There's not a lot of color in cave art, usually just black (likely charcoal) and ochre (for the red/brown), but organic dyes are mostly a feature of local plant life/minerals, so having at least basic red/blue/yellow/green (probably of dimmer shades) wouldn't be out of the question. Just not sure how they work with the aesthetic.

Bit of trivia: the hunting method in that clip is based on actual research-theory done about the Clovis people that populated North America starting around ~14,000-12,000 BCE. It's been suggested that hunters would chase the megafauna (mammoth, ground sloth, et cetera) into canyons where they couldn't escape, and throw down rocks and spears on their quarry.

Added a shoe-looking shark, a couple of inky octopi frames, and a bunch of fish with the same template setup as the vase. Examples:

They look a little iffy cos it's zoomed x2 or x3 and I forgot about that til I posted them just now. ;P

The music notation is a little thing I came up with awhile ago but these are new images for it, so. ;p The first three are your hand hitting a surface (open-palm slam, closed-fist pound, knuckles), and the last three are claps (pretty easy to figure them out I think).

Well I added a basic one-frame attack for the spear, spear + shield, and bow sprites, and there's also an arrow sprite that fits in the right place on the bow-attack image.

Also have them so that each kind of human frame (nothing, with shield, with spear, et cetera) sit on the trike.. but they don't really mean much alone, so I didn't want to add another 10-15 images to the page as it was. But they'll be included in the zip. May try and do up/down attacks as well, may try and do interstitial frames of the attack.. but probably not =p We'll see how it goes.